


Sins of the Father

by Evidence



Category: Princess Maker 2
Genre: Comedy, Family, Fatherhood, Gen, Letter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 12:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3382022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evidence/pseuds/Evidence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A beam of light descended from the heavens.</p><p>There was a naked little girl in it.</p><p>“What,” I said, because it was the only word I could manage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sins of the Father

 

I never asked for this life. But then, who does? Really? In fact, considering it, I might have asked for this life, at some point when I was an incorporeal spirit with no concept of what it would be like to actually _live._ That sounds like the kind of stupid thing a particularly ignorant bundle of pre-life energy might do. If that's the case, though, I don't recall it.

My childhood was nothing anyone would call ‘normal’. My father was a bandit and my mother was – depending on his mood – either a tavern wench, a mermaid, a prostitute, a runaway noble woman, a talented cat burglar, an Amazonian huntress, or a harpy. I suppose I shall never know the truth behind it. When I was eight he traded me to a mad hermit in exchange for a book on taxidermy. I’ll never forget his parting words to me – “them’s the brakes, boyo; if he tries ta touch yer nads, poke ‘im in the eyes with yer thumbnails”.

In the end, the hermit turned out to be a marginally better parent than my father. He was half-blind and mostly senile, but his hut was pretty fair, and he owned a lot of books. He also knew how to fight like an angry mountain lion, and in some of his rare moments of lucidity, taught me how to hold a sword like it was a sword and not a club. Living out in the wilderness had its downsides, of course, not least of which were all of the monsters. They can be fair enough if you know how to talk to them, but even then, some just don’t want to be reasoned with, and a few have a particular taste for human blood. When I was thirteen I went out to check some rabbit snares I’d set up, and came back to find a dragon sitting on the old hermit’s hut, picking the old hermit himself out of his teeth.

“Ah,” the dragon said. “Well, this is awkward. Are you his… son? Grandson?”

“More like a kind of an impulse buy, t’be honest,” I replied, doing an admirable job of not shitting myself, if I may say so.

“You’re not going to be interested in avenging him, then?” the dragon inquired.

“Not even a little bit,” I replied, though that wasn’t entirely true. I did feel a _little bit_ like maybe I owed the old hermit some sort of obligatory shot at an avenging or something. But it was only a very little bit. The old man had been relatively decent, not _spectacular._ If it’d been a lion or a bear or something I might have given a go of it, but a dragon was much too much.

“Oh, good,” the dragon said. “Those cross-generational familial vendettas get very tedious. I’m actually retired, you know.”

“Right-o,” I replied. It was looking more and more like I might get out of the encounter without being eaten, too, so I was hoping it would end soon and then I could figure out what in the gods’ names I was going to do with myself.

“Aren’t you going to ask why I ate your… erm, friend, if I’m supposed to be retired?” the dragon wondered.

“S’none of my business, izzit?” I pointed out.

“You’re not even a _little_ curious?”

The dragon sounded disappointed. It seemed like a bad idea to disappoint a dragon, so I sighed, and asked:

“Why’d ya eat him, if yer retired-like?”

“A cross-generational family vendetta,” the dragon replied, with some obvious amusement. At my blank look, he added: “That old bastard used to be a self-proclaimed knight. He slew one of my sons on some quest or another.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry fer yer loss.”

“That’s alright. It’s been forty years. The sting’s worn down a bit,” the dragon assured me. “What’s your name?”

“Oyl,” I replied. I had never been particularly clear on whether that was my first name or my last name. It’s entirely possible, given my father, that my full name is actually ‘Oyl Oyl’. For dignity’s sake, I didn’t mention that.

“Well, Oyl. As it appears I’m sitting on your house, I can’t help but wonder what you plan to do next?”

“Dunno,” I replied. “Reckon I’ll pitch a tent, like. Fer now.”

The Dragon gave me a Look. The last time I’d seen a Look like that, I’d been five years old, and it had been on the face of a friendly pastor that my father had kidnapped for ransom. It had seemed sort of appropriate there. On a dragon, it just looked bizarre.

“Why don’t you come along with me?” the dragon suggested. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a coin counter, and I could use the conversation.”

Refusing a dragon’s offer didn’t seem like the Done Thing, so I just nodded, and tried not to scream too girlishly when he reached over with a giant clawed hand and picked me up, and then took off into the air. It’s possible I may have vomited along the way. Once or twice. I was very careful not to vomit _on_ the dragon, at least, which, if you really stop and think about it, shows a considerable amount of good sense. The dragon essentially plucked me from my former home in the forest and carted me southwards, to the desert, until we got to a bunch of sun-bleached ruins and he told me to start inventorying his treasure.

Desert life was a marked change from forest hermitage. The monsters were different, and the food sources were scarce, and there was the problem of how I needed to drink water every day but dragons, apparently, could get by on just once a week or so. But the dragon’s collection of treasure was almost as interesting as the hermit’s collection of books, and I learned a great deal about sums and budgeting and metalwork in his company. It’s amazing what fearing for your life can do for your learning curve. Three years passed before I even learned that the dragon had a human form. A rare caravan was making its way through the desert, and the dragon wanted to meet it, to see if there were any beautiful women he could ogle.

“S’not right,” I muttered. “What’s a great scaly dragon want with _human_ women?”

“No, ‘that is not right’ and ‘what _does_ a _magnificently resplendent_ dragon want with human women’,” the dragon corrected, having become fixated on my grammar for reasons known only to him. “Dragons are drawn to beauty, my boy. Besides, most shape-changers can appreciate other forms quite well. Comes with the territory.”

Then, before I could blink, the old son of a bitch started glowing, and when he was finished glowing, a wrinkled, spotted, weathered old elf was standing in front of me. He’d never convince anyone he was actually human, but he was a lot closer to the mark at that point.

I swore.

“How’d you do that?”

The dragon tapped the side of his nose, and that was the most I ever got out of him on the subject. We went out to the caravan, but apparently desert travelers weren’t any more prone to having beautiful women in their ranks than bandit camps, isolated forest huts, or abandoned desert ruins. I had _seen_ women, of course. I suspect I’d even spoken to a few, when I was small. But for the most part the opposite sex remained a mystery.

The old dragon got bored and left when it became apparent that there were only smelly male travelers to be seen. Fortunately, however, I managed to barter some goods from them, and that turned out to be one of the better months for living in the ruins. I even got a sturdy hip flask in exchange for an old dragon scale – half full, and I’d say that was my first taste of liquor, but, you know, irresponsible bandit father. It _was_ my first good drink since I was eight years old, though. The hermit’s moonshine was the kind of dreck not even bandits would touch.

When I turned eighteen, the dragon announced that I was a man and it was time for me to find my place in the world. As if there was any place for me in the world that wasn’t just wherever I happened to scratch out a living. But the dragon was adamant, and to be honest, I was pretty impressed with my own ability to survive that long without getting myself spit-roasted, so I didn’t make much of a fuss about it. The old beast gave me a sack full of coins and a slap on the back, and told me if I ever found a pretty wife, I should bring her by for him to ogle. That seemed like a reasonable request to me, but then, what you have to remember is that I was raised by bandits, a hermit, and a shape-shifting pervert.

Needless to say, during my first real foray into civilization, I did not make a spectacularly positive impression. Even with my copious amounts of coin. After making an absolute imbecile of myself in front of one of the mayor’s daughters, I was put on the village’s blacklist. They didn’t run me out, but after I spent the evening getting as drunk as possible in their sweltering shack of a tavern, they _did_ rob me blind. As I stumbled out into the morning’s light, one of the tavern wenches stared at me, pityingly, and informed me that I had the look of a man who could “use some church in him”.

As it was the only piece of advice anyone seemed willing to offer, and the alternative was wandering off into the wilderness and trying to make my own hut or something, I staggered into the village’s tiny church. It was, I suppose, a nice enough building. There were only four pews and an altar, and a room at the back that was closed off, and it smelled strongly of incense. But as I was used to the demon brimstone of the desert and dragon ash, it didn't bother me much.

I had never doubted the existence of the gods. Largely because I had never contemplated it. My father had only ever mentioned divinity in the context of curse words, the hermit’s books had spoken of the pantheon of the heavens in very factual tones – or else not at all – and, looking back on it, the dragon discussed the gods in much the same way that other people might discuss their annoying relatives. It had never occurred to me to _disbelieve_ in them. I didn’t even know that it was a question of belief at all, I just assumed I’d never seen the gods for the same reason that I’d never seen a sail boat or a strawberry shortcake; because my life experiences were largely limited to whatever happened upon me in the wilderness. I was somewhat glad a god had never happened upon me, actually. I assumed they were hard to kill.

Regardless, that was how my first foray into true adulthood found me – dead broke and hung-over in a church. Auspicious. There were some crude carvings of the deities behind the altar. I gazed upon them and felt something like a tingling in the depths of my bones. It was alarming. I was concerned that someone had poisoned me. Or that I was coming down with a touch of plague.

The local nun happened upon me, rather stealthily, and nearly scared me out of my skin when she started talking to me from behind the pew.

“The gods help those who turn their gazes to the stars, with faith in their hearts and repentance on their tongues,” she informed me. I blinked owlishly at her.

“Repentance?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Repentance for what?” I clarified my question.

“For their Sin, of course,” she replied, clucking her tongue. I opted to tread very lightly with her here. The last time I’d spoken to a woman I’d congratulated her on her magnificent bosom, and apparently that was not appropriate social etiquette, no matter what previous authority figures in my life may have led me to believe.

“What is their Sin and why are they repenting it?” I asked. The nun looked at me like I’d grown another head, and I considered that maybe there was some sort of secret trick to talking to women that no one had ever bothered to explain to me. Like a code. That had seemed like such a simple, polite question before I’d asked it.

“Their _Sin,_ ” the nun repeated, as if that was going to be at all helpful. “Their vices. Their crimes against the ordained celestial laws?”

“Oh, _that,_ ” I replied. The word had slipped my memory, but now that she had described it more, I could recall reading about such things in some of the hermit’s books. The gods expected people to behave a certain way, and turned their favour from those who defied them. I’d never given it much thought. I had assumed that it only applied to people who had received the gods’ favour to begin with; like how advice on how to keep your hat from denting out of shape was only applicable to people who owned hats.

“I don’t think I’m qualified to be here,” I concluded, looking around the tiny little building with new eyes.

The nun seemed to be on sturdier ground with that sentiment. She smiled at me. It wasn’t precisely a _kind_ smile, but it was still a smile.

“All are welcome who seek to repent,” she said.

I blinked at her.

“Uhm,” I said. “And how does one, uh, ‘repent’, then?”

After all, it wasn’t as if I had anywhere else to be. The nun informed me that the church was always willing to accept charitable donations, but for those without the means to pay – and there she paused and gave me a very pointed once-over – service to the church could also be a means of salvation.

Which was, in a nutshell, how I found myself spending three months in that miserable little village, sweeping floors, fixing roofs, doing odd, messy jobs, sleeping under the church’s pews and venturing into the woods to trap and hunt and otherwise make myself useful. I didn’t feel any particular influx of moral character or personal integrity; though I’d never really considered myself to be _without_ those things, either. The nearest thing to it was that the weird vibrations in my bones got stronger whenever I stood near the church’s altar, and sometimes, when I looked at renderings of the gods, it felt as if someone was looking back. And that was just unnerving.

My popularity in the village didn’t precisely improve, either. People expressed disbelief with some of my claims of wilderness survival and employment with dragons. Fortunately, however, by staying in the village, it didn’t take me long to track down the people who had robbed me. Sudden influxes of wealth were rather noticeable in small communities. I managed to recover a good third of what I’d had through dint of breaking-and-entering under the cover of darkness, and, with a much looser coin purse and a slightly wiser head, I set out again.

After a month of wilderness wanderings, the second village I came upon was much further north, and considerably larger than the first. I kept my coin close and avoided looking at any women I passed, and stayed out of the tavern, too, and eventually got directions to a trading post, where I found out that most civilized people were happy to pay coin for animal and monster parts. The village saw enough visitors and travelers passing through that the locals weren’t overly unsettled by strangers, or by strangeness in general. As soon as they learned that I had nothing in the way of ‘city gossip’, they more or less left me alone. So I set up camp a few hours away, and worried over the puzzle of how exactly someone was supposed to go about finding a ‘place’.

The city gossip that so interested the villagers was all about the Capital; a big, gleaming maze of buildings, to hear it told, all stretched at the foot of the castle where the king and queen lived. Apparently, the royal family had abandoned the church, and stretched their marital vows to the point where the king was building his own harem and the queen was entertaining the ‘company’ of many a brave knight. Scandalous tales of debauchery were whispered with something near to delight on the streets, while in the church, the Sisters decried the Sin of the royals and foretold doom and suffering on any who followed in their footsteps. Things came to a head when word began passing around that the king had slaughtered one of the sacred rams of Aries for his Harvest Feast.

Then the undead began showing up.

I had seen them in the desert, of course. The old dragon told me once that there was a gate to the Underworld somewhere in the twisting caverns along the outskirts, and demons filled the dark places there and came slinking out whenever the moon was high. They enjoyed their revelries, and were as apt to offer a man a boon as they were to slit his throat. But I’d never seen them in the hermit’s forest, or before then, and with the way the people in the village panicked, it was clear that they’d never seen any at all. Decrepit warriors pulled themselves up out of their graves, and bat demons twisted their ways out of the shadows between rafters, and wraiths crawled over the hills. My popularity grew exponentially when it became clear that I knew how to kill them. My little camp became far too exposed for me to keep, so instead I found myself once again sleeping under church pews; only then, the villagers brought me blankets and a lantern and a pillow, and other little gifts, always given whenever I drove another couple of creatures away from their borders. The beasts weren’t terribly persistent. Just numerous, and vicious as their natures bid them be.

The number of travelers passing through the village dwindled considerably. Those who did pass through whispered –as though afraid of being overheard – that an army of fiends had been spotted, making march on the capital, and led by the Prince of Darkness himself. Word was that the king was challenging the Wrath of the Gods, and in a desperate bid for a stay of execution, had put a price on Lucifon’s head.

It sounded like madness, to me. It would be better to just abandon the city, but, then again, the demons would probably still hunt them down in any case.

It seemed like a shame, too, that the gleaming city I’d heard about would be destroyed before I ever got a chance to see it. I’d never consciously thought about going there before, but when I considered the matter, it seemed as if some part of me had already decided that I would. The Sisters in the church talked about repentance and penance and divine justice, and how Lucifon’s army would spread with the Sin of the world, and they spoke about it like they were almost _excited_ for it, which seemed like madness to me. They were certainly frightened enough of the demons themselves whenever they came into town. I wondered if Lucifon was really acting on the orders of the gods. But then, why wouldn’t he be? And what kind of man was the Prince of Darkness, anyway? The church talked about him as if he was the embodiment of Sin in one breath, and the servant of the celestial divine in the other. How could one embody defiance of the divine laws and be the arbiter of divine justice at the same time?

I didn’t dare ask the Sisters, for fear of misspeaking and being banned from their church. Among them I had a reputation for being quiet. ‘Painfully shy’, one had put it once, and while it wasn’t quite true, it was better than what had happened last time.

And then one morning I woke up and I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I needed to go and see it. The city. The army. Perhaps even the gods, if they deigned to appear. I wasn’t even sure what I was hoping to gain from it, except that it seemed like that was where everything important was bound to be happening, and I would always regret it if I missed it. So I left the village – snuck away in the dead of night, really – and made my way along the roads, killing anything that accosted me with knives and fists and blades and the spare bits of magic I’d learned. I passed no one, until one evening I crested a dry hilltop, and looked down to see Lucifon’s army spread beneath my feet.

I had never seen an army before. In fact, I had never seen so large a congregation of any beings before, except perhaps ants. But where ants were organized, Lucifon’s army was a boiling mess of chaos.

Well, it was an army of demons. What else was it going to be? They hissed and spit and skirmished with one another, here a cluster squabbling over bloodied chunks of unidentified meat, there a gang of revellers drinking their spare time away. They’d made camp and pillaged the countryside. In the far distance I could see farmland burning. I could smell the brimstone, too, though I had smelled it for some time. It put me in mind of dry desert caves, and I thought about how far they’d dragged it behind them in their long march from home. Lucifon himself I couldn’t see, but somehow, even in the disorganized chaos of their camp, the demons had managed to set up several ornate red and black tents. Beyond them, and the burning the farms, lay the bright spires of the castle, and the capital city around it.

I shadowed the army as they advanced towards the city, and the bright-bannered soldiers who waited for them there. If the king had ever thought he could win by strength of arms, he had sorely misjudged his enemy’s might. The demons fell upon the city, and it was a massacre. Screams. Blood. Fire. I had seen death before, in abundance, even, but never like _that._ It seemed to me that divine justice was as ugly as – if not uglier than – the Sin it had come to cleanse. When the demons breached the gates, not only soldiers fell. It was clear the army meant to massacre every soul inside.

I had never thought of myself as a brave man. Neither had I thought of myself as a coward. I was a survivor, and my survivor’s instincts told me to leave.

But I didn’t. The bards call it ‘valour’, but I think it was more anger that motivated me, really. Maybe a bit of curiosity and conceit thrown in for good measure. The pragmatist in me can’t even say that I was thinking of the reward, because it had slipped my mind entirely.

Even demons could not hope to completely decimate a city in one night. By day, they set up camp within the city’s outer walls, preparing for the second – and final – strike, to take the castle and all those cowering within it.

At noon, I crept into the camp, and what followed became history. They have put me in books for it, now, books like the ones I might have read in the hermit’s shack, books about heroes and glorious deeds and history. The great warrior Oyl, who stole into the devil’s tent, and challenged him to a duel for the sake of the city. Who won, through strength of arms, and prompted the demon army to turn back. Who was knighted by the king and queen, both of them so terrified by their brush with divine justice that they promptly repented their Sinful ways.

It was an ugly fight, in truth. Lucifon struck like a hammer, and towered over me, and I attacked him like the wild scrapper that I was. There wasn’t any bargain or agreement between us, no bows or handshakes. I wasn’t trying to fight him one-on-one to prove a point to the gods. I was trying to kill him to get his army to disperse.

When Lucifon yielded before I could slay him, the only thing I could think to ask for in exchange for his life was the withdrawal of his army from the Capital. Everything else was just fanciful stuff that minstrels added after the fact. The truth was my blade at the devil’s neck, and the bone in my left leg shattered so terribly that it’s never been the same since.

The king did ask me to stay, though, and even half-ruined, the Capital was mesmerizing, so it was an easy thing to agree to. If I could have a place here, I thought, that would be a fine thing. One of the demons, left behind by Lucifon’s army and captured by some of the surviving knights, was given to me to execute. He was a tiny little bat-winged thing, barely more than a boy, and trembled when he told me his name. Cube. It hardly seemed fair to kill him. So, in the spirit of the mad old hermit and the dragon who had raised me, I let him live with me, instead.

It turned out to be a brilliant decision. Cube, as it turned out, was quite curious about humans, and knew more about living in a city than I did by a wide margin. More to the point, he knew how to look after the unwieldy manor house I’d been gifted as part of my reward, which was good because a lifetime of shacks, ruins, and church pews hadn’t prepared me at all for the realities of furnaces and gutters and fine china display cases. The nobility toadied up to me excessively, which was hugely unsettling and confusing, until it somehow became clear that they wouldn’t gain much from it, at which point they more or less ignored me.

I vastly preferred that arrangement. The city was mesmerizing, but like a jewelled viper. Everything seemed overlaid with hidden meanings, and most of my conversations left me feeling like I was lacking vital context for them. I travelled as often as my bad leg allowed, and my life returned to some semblance of familiarity when I was on the road.

And then the gods spoke to me.

That was weird.

I supposed, if there was ever a time when they would have taken notice of me, it should have been when I was on the verge of slaying their arbiter of divine justice. Not several months after the fact, while I was sitting on a hillside, contemplating whether or not I should try and catch my own fish for dinner or just let Cube fetch one from the marketplace.

A beam of light descended from the heavens.

There was a naked little girl in it.

“What,” I said, because it was the only word I could manage.

I said it a lot. The gods, with their voices like song, wove their way between the constellations, and didn’t adequately answer any of my questions or really do anything useful at all. The girl they gave me had been sleeping in the light of the Heavens. Why? What was she? A new god, or a demigod of some kind? They offered no reply, save to say that she was being given over to me, to raise and care for until she reached maturity.

 _Me_.

The gods gave _me_ a little girl. Not in the sense of my having accidentally impregnated a woman – which even I knew would have been quite a feat, considering that, even with my newfound celebrity, I’d still yet to even touch one – but they literally just gave one to me. For free, even.

Of course, no one in the city believed that the gods had actually bestowed a child upon me in the literal sense. They just thought I was being particularly euphemistic about discovering I had a bastard.

But after the shock wore off, I resolved to do my best to raise my new daughter – that being you, of course – to be… well, not a miserable shell of a human being, I supposed. Some kind of lady was probably ideal?

The first night after I brought you home, I let Cube fuss over you and set up one of the spare rooms to be suitable, and then went and responsibly sat in the toolshed and panicked a tiny bit. Why did you have to be a _girl,_ I bemoaned! I didn’t know how to teach anyone to be a woman! What if I couldn’t figure out the secret language of females and so you never learned it and ended up ostracized and unable to communicate with your own kind? What were the gods thinking, precisely? I was in no way qualified to guide an innocent soul through the rigors of life. There were days when I felt barely qualified to supervise _Cube’s_ journey through the rigors of life, and he is a _demon._

It’s possible that a certain degree of cursing and the imbibing of expensive alcohol occurred. I honestly can’t quite say, as I don’t recall much of what happened between my minor break-down in the toolshed and my waking up to find that I was lying in the back hedge while Cube peered disapprovingly down at me.

“You’re not setting a good example for the Young Mistress,” he said.

I swore, and started flailing my way out of the bushes. “Cube, Cube where is she? Do we need to feed her? _What do girls eat?”_

“She’s still sleeping, and I expect she eats all the same things that other humans do,” Cube informed me. Then he seemed to reconsider. “Except for alcohol, sir. That’s not good for human children.”

“What, really?” I asked.

“Really,” he confirmed.

“I didn’t even know that!” I exclaimed. “Cube, the gods are mad. I am hopelessly unqualified for this task!”

Cube nodded in agreement, but also shrugged in such a way as to simultaneously imply that there was no helping it, either way, and that was true enough. There was a little girl sleeping in my fancy manor house, tucked in by my demon butler, placed in my care by the gods themselves, and the turn my life had taken really wasn’t one I could have ever predicted. I felt like a duck being asked to play a piano. No, rather I felt like a duck who’d been told that an innocent child’s well-being was hanging in the balance of how _well_ he managed to play a piano.

But there was no choice, really.

I simply had to learn how to play.

And that is how we came to be where we are, my daughter. You are eighteen, now, and in your room, writing your own letter to me as I pen this one to you. I know your childhood has been strange and imperfect. With the gift of hindsight I can see that some of my choices were, perhaps… unorthodox, at best. But I have done what I can, and it is up to you, from this point on, to make what you will of it, and to know, at least, why I made some of the decisions I did. I will not delude myself into thinking that my parenting days are at an end just because you have reached adulthood. You may be grown, and you may have come to me through atypical means, but you are my daughter and there is no changing that now. It was not the king or the city or even my battle with Lucifon that gave me my place in the world. It was you.

Whatever else comes, I will always love you.

Sincerely,

Your Father

 


End file.
